Writer’s Therapy

I’ve been working for a month on what’s turned into a very long (some 7500 words) “short” story. That’s been good; it’s allowed my first-person narrator’s mind to wander and thus to complicate the story. The challenge there was to allow a reader into his river of connected thoughts (bouncing back and forth in time) but in a way that wouldn’t confuse the reader.

image via blog.changeanything.com

Now, as I let this story simmer for a couple of weeks, I’m writing another, much shorter story – some 1500-2000 words – a form of writer’s therapy, I think. This provides another challenge, though: for a natural long-form writer such as me, I have to reel my story-telling in, tell a complete story, but focus it on a very stripped down series of events, with much implied, and tell it structurally in as few words as possible.